Author: SeniorWomenWeb

Under the Skin: In my youth we were all expected to keep our feelings under control if not under wraps

By Joan L. Cannon

Frontispiece for the 1638 edition of Anatomy of Melancholy; a book by Robert Burton, first published in 1621

I just read a quote from Jim Harrison (Legends of the Fall among other books): “Life is sentimental … The biggest things in people’s lives is (sic.) their loves and dreams and visions, you know.”

Not for the first time, I wanted to shout, “Hear, hear!” Like most of my contemporaries and I suspect most of the young, sentimentality is embarrassing at best and nauseating at worst. Yet, who could gainsay the truth of Mr. Harrison’s remark? I have a notion that the imperative to appear untouched or minimally moved by emotion has to do with an innate fear of showing weakness.

Of course, that idea leads to a question about what constitutes weakness and its opposite. There’s hardly a soul qualified to read something on this site who hasn’t been exposed willy-nilly to countless situations requiring restraint. The imperative to hide feelings has always seemed to be mostly for the male of the species until the twenties or thirties. A Victorian lady was allowed “the vapors.” In my youth, however, we were all expected to keep our feelings under control if not under wraps.

If we’re lucky, we’ve been given opportunities to let loose too — to have the relief or joy of openness when we felt safe enough (or were completely hidden from view). Just think of the people we all know whose fear of allowing emotions to be revealed have tied themselves in psychological and emotional knots, or who have succumbed to psychosomatic problems.

Maybe what is required is for our culture to teach us how to know when the occasion legitimizes a free response. Tears still are the most common, even the most allowable demonstration of emotion, and nowadays some men can let them fall without feeling utterly shamed. On the other hand, joy, gratitude, tenderness, empathy seem to have built-in limits even now. Unfortunately or not, heritage and mores historically restrict those expressions mightily. Yet what goes on in hearts and minds demands recognition. Thankfully, here come the arts to help, especially the literary and dramatic ones.

Readers of history, biography, literary fiction, poetry, plays are the lucky ones whose emotional landscape is laid out for unfettered exploration by anyone willing to look it over. Most of us are familiar in differing degrees with the chime of recognition that fills our marrow with warmth when we read something that we not only recognize, but see clarified, revealed, often amplified because it seems to have let something out into open air that identifies us absolutely as part of all humanity. I’m not suggesting we should ‘let it all hang out,’ but I do wish that when something earth shaking in our personal worlds occurs, we need not feel we need to hide our reactions.

There is ample evidence of symbolism from prehistory to the present day that relates one human being to another, and distinguishes us from ‘lower’ life forms. Even the cave dwellers bothered to embellish their tools and their homes with signs they selected to prove what they understood. No culture lives without music, drama, oral traditions, and mythology. Life happens, as the young say (when they’re being polite) and it does get under our outer layers. Should we be ashamed if we let on when bruised, made to itch, infuriated, devastated? Everybody should try writing it down once in a while.

I recently saw a remark made by Arthur Miller to the effect that a writer’s best work is always what he feared was something that might make him regret exposing himself. He said it’s an artistic mistake to pretend to lack strong feelings. He implied that it’s the job of the arts to show how to let them out.

Making statements is not the way to go. To help your fellow travelers as well as yourself on the journey of experience is by allowing tears to show, or offering a hand. Drafting a note or poem can demonstrate that something penetrates beneath the skin. Too many need thinner skins. We need to learn that awareness is not a weakness. Lecturers like to refer to ‘the human condition’ — something we’re all heir to and we can’t afford to forget it, if progress is our aim.

©2015 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com

January 16, 2015
Psychological Stress and Social Media Use; Women report experiencing significantly higher levels of stress than men
January 15, 2015

By Keith Hampton , Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, Inyoung Shin and Kristen Purcell

Daughter of Niobe bent by terror of Artemis. Uffizi Gallery, Sala della Niobe, Wikimedia Commons

It makes sense to wonder if the use of digital technology creates stress. There is more information flowing into people’s lives now than ever — much of it distressing and challenging. There are more possibilities for interruptions and distractions. It is easier now to track what friends, frenemies, and foes are doing and to monitor raises and falls in status on a near-constant basis. There is more social pressure to disclose personal information. These technologies are said to takeover people’s lives, creating time and social pressures that put people at risk for the negative physical and psychological health effects that can result from stress.

Stress might come from maintaining a large network of Facebook friends, feeling jealous of their well-documented and well-appointed lives, the demands of replying to text messages, the addictive allure of photos of fantastic crafts on Pinterest, having to keep up with status updates on Twitter, and the “fear of missing out” on activities in the lives of friends and family.9

We add to this debate with a large, representative study of American adults and explore an alternative explanation for the relationship between technology use and stress. We test the possibility that a specific activity, common to many of these technologies, might be linked to stress. It is possible that technology users — especially those who use social media — are more aware of stressful events in the lives of their friends and family. This increased awareness of stressful events in other people’s lives may contribute to the stress people have in their own lives. This study explores the digital-age realities of a phenomenon that is well documented: Knowledge of undesirable events in other’s lives carries a cost — the cost of caring.10

This study explores the relationship between a variety of digital technology uses and psychological stress. We asked people an established measure of stress that is known as the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS).11 The PSS consists of ten questions and measures the degree to which individuals feel that their lives are overloaded, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Participants were asked:

In the last 30 days, how often have you:
1. Been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly
2. Felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life
3. Felt nervous and “stressed”
4. Felt confident about your ability to handle any personal problems
5. Felt that things were going your way
6. Found that you could not cope with all the things that you had to do
7. Been able to control irritations in your life
8. Felt that you were on top of things
9. Been angered because of things that were outside of your control
10. Felt difficulties were piling up so high that you could not overcome them
Participants responded on a 4-point scale from “frequently” to “never.” The ten items were combined so that a higher score indicates higher psychological stress (the scale ranges from 0-30 with zero representing no stress and 30 representing the highest level).12
January 15, 2015
Is There a Program for That? Computers Can Judge Personality Traits More Accurately Than One’s Friends and Colleagues Study Finds

By Clifton B. Parker

Computers can judge personality traits far more precisely than ever believed, according to newly published research.

In fact, they might do so better than one’s friends and colleagues. The study, published Jan. 12 and conducted jointly by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge, compares the ability of computers and people to make accurate judgments about our personalities. People’s judgments were based on their familiarity with the judged individual, while the computer used digital signals — Facebook “likes.”

The researchers were Michal Kosinski, co-lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Department of Computer Science; Wu Youyou, co-lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge; and David Stillwell, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

According to Kosinski, the findings reveal that by mining a person’s Facebook “likes,” a computer was able to predict a person’s personality more accurately than most of their friends and family. Only a person’s spouse came close to matching the computer’s results.

The computer predictions were based on which articles, videos, artists and other items the person had liked on Facebook. The idea was to see how closely a computer prediction could match the subject’s own scores on the five most basic personality dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The researchers noted, “This is an emphatic demonstration of the ability of a person’s psychological traits to be discovered by an analysis of data, not requiring any person-to-person interaction. It shows that machines can get to know us better than we’d previously thought, a crucial step in interactions between people and computers.”

Kosinski, a computational social scientist, pointed out that “the findings also suggest that in the future, computers could be able to infer our psychological traits and react accordingly, leading to the emergence of emotionally intelligent and socially skilled machines.”

“In this context,” he added, “the human-computer interactions depicted in science fiction films such as Her seem not to be beyond our reach.”

He said the research advances previous work from the University of Cambridge in 2013 that showed that a variety of psychological and demographic characteristics could be “predicted with startling accuracy” through Facebook likes.

In the new study, researchers collected personality self-ratings of 86,220 volunteers using a standard, 100-item long personality questionnaire. Human judges, including Facebook friends and family members, expressed their judgment of a subject’s personality using a 10-item questionnaire. Computer-based personality judgments, based on their Facebook likes, were obtained for the participants.

The results showed that a computer could more accurately predict the subject’s personality than a work colleague by analyzing just 10 likes; more than a friend or a roommate with 70; a family member with 150; and a spouse with 300 likes.

“Given that an average Facebook user has about 227 likes (and this number is growing steadily), artificial intelligence has a potential to know us better than our closest companions do,” wrote Kosinski and his colleagues.

Why are machines better in judging personality than human beings?

Kosinski said that computers have a couple of key advantages over human beings in the area of personality analysis. Above all, they can retain and access large quantities of information, and analyze all this data through algorithms.

This provides the accuracy that the human mind has a hard time achieving due to a human tendency to give too much weight to one or two examples or to lapse into non-rational ways of thinking, the researchers wrote.

Nevertheless, the authors concede that the detection of some personality traits might be best left to human beings, such as “those (traits) without digital footprints and those depending on subtle cognition.”

Wu, lead author of the study, explains that the plot behind a movie like Her (released in 2013) becomes increasingly realistic. The film involves a man who strikes up a relationship with an advanced computer operating system that promises to be an intuitive entity in its own right.

“The ability to accurately assess psychological traits and states, using digital footprints of behavior, occupies an important milestone on the path toward more social human-computer interactions,” said Wu.

Such data-driven decisions could improve people’s lives, the researchers said. For example, recruiters could better match candidates with jobs based on their personality, and companies could better match products and services with consumers’ personalities.

“The ability to judge personality is an essential component of social living — from day-to-day decisions to long-term plans such as whom to marry, trust, hire or elect as president,” said Stillwell.

The researchers acknowledge that this type of research may conjure up privacy concerns about online data mining and tracking the activities of users.

“A future with our habits being an open book may seem dystopian to those who worry about privacy,” they wrote.

Kosinski said, “We hope that consumers, technology developers and policymakers will tackle those challenges by supporting privacy-protecting laws and technologies, and giving the users full control over their digital footprints.”

In July, Kosinski will begin a new appointment as an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

January 13, 2015
House and Home, a Traveling Exhibition: There’s No Place Like …

Vizcaya, Miami, Florida. Architect: F. Burrall Hoffman. Built: 1916; Model by Studios Eichbaum + Arnold, 2010. Photo by National Building Museum staff

Editor’s Note: See locations of the exhibition for 2015 and beyond (link below)

House & Home is going on the road!

House & Home, which opened at the National Building Museum in April 2012, was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Each year, the NEH chooses a few projects, prepares them for travel, and sends them across the country to increase visibility for the exhibitions and provide access for visitors nationwide. Through NEH on the Road, a division of Mid-America Arts Alliance, House & Home began its journey in September 2013, and will travel for another four years to venues across the country.

Drawn from the flagship installation at the National Building Museum, the traveling version of House & Home explores houses both familiar and surprising, past and present, and reveals the varied history and cultural meanings of the American home. Though smaller than the original exhibition, the traveling version draws on similar themes, encouraging visitors to explore how our ideal of the perfect house and our experience of what it means to “be at home” have changed over time.

The exhibition includes domestic furnishings and home construction materials, photographs, “please touch” interactive components, and films. Together, the objects and images illustrate how transformations in technology, government policy, and consumer culture have impacted American domestic life. Quotations, toys, and other graphic advertising materials prompt visitors to think about the different ideas embodied in the words “house” and “home.” The exhibition also showcases domestic objects − from cooking utensils to telephones − and traces how household goods tell the stories of our family traditions, heritage, and the activity of daily living.

Installation photo showing House & Home’s dramatic display of 200 household objects. Credit: © 2012 National Building Museum, Photo by Allan Sprecher

House & Home also explores how different laws, historic trends, and economic factors have impacted housing in America. The American Dream, once more generally seen as an aspiration to prosperity, grew in the 20th century to be synonymous with home ownership. Visitors learn about the economy of housing and how homes have been promoted and sold. Issues of housing inequality, land distribution, and the role of the government are examined, from the Colonial period though the Homestead Act and the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in the 1930s; and from the Oklahoma Land Rush to the subprime loan crisis.

Related sections of House & Home look outward, exploring the relationship of the individual house to the larger society by presenting examples of contemporary community development through film. House & Home moves beyond the bricks and mortar to challenge our ideas about what it means to be at home in America.

Here is a schedule of this traveling exhibition from the National Building Museum. And don’t forget the National Building Museum shop with such unusual products as this Glasgow School of Art Facade Model:

Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Building, “The Mac” or “Toshie” as it is commonly known, was voted Britain’s favorite building of the last 175 years in a 2009 Royal Institute of British Architects poll. The facade is asymmetric with tower like masonry walls and small windows which evoke Scottish baronial architecture. Building was started in 1897 to a design created by the school’s most famous alumnus, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a leading proponent of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements in the United Kingdom. The Mackintosh Building is his masterwork. This architectural sculpture is of the slightly off-center entrance facade. It was handcrafted by the duo Chisel & Mouse in their studio in Sussex, England and is made of strong plaster that has a reassuring weight and smooth, cool feel. The window frames and door are made of etched brass. See more work from Chisel & Mouse here.

January 11, 2015
“This year, I’m going to lose some weight:” Beware of Products Promising Miracle Weight Loss

“This year, I’m going to lose some weight.”

If you find yourself making this common New Year’s resolution, know this: many so-called ‘”miracle” weight loss supplements and foods (including teas and coffees) don’t live up to their claims. Worse, they can cause serious harm, say FDA regulators. The agency has found hundreds of products that are marketed as dietary supplements but actually contain hidden active ingredients (components that make a medicine effective against a specific illness) contained in prescription drugs, unsafe ingredients that were in drugs that have been removed from the market, or compounds that have not been adequately studied in humans.

“When the product contains a drug or other ingredient which is not listed as an ingredient we become especially concerned about the safety of the product,” says James P. Smith, MD, an acting deputy director in FDA’s Office of Drug Evaluation.

For example, FDA has found weight-loss products tainted with the prescription drug ingredient sibutramine. This ingredient was in an FDA-approved drug called Meridia, which was removed from the market in October 2010 because it caused heart problems and strokes.

“We’ve also found weight-loss products marketed as supplements that contain dangerous concoctions of hidden ingredients including active ingredients contained in approved seizure medications, blood pressure medications, and antidepressants,” says Jason Humbert, a senior regulatory manager at FDA. Most recently, FDA has found a number of products marketed as dietary supplements containing fluoxetine, the active ingredient found in Prozac, a prescription drug marketed for the treatment of depression and other conditions. Another product contained triamterene, a powerful diuretic (sometimes known as “water pills”) that can have serious side-effects and should only be used under the supervision of a health care professional.

Many of these tainted products are imported, sold online, and heavily promoted on social media sites. Some can also be found on store shelves.

January 9, 2015
Birds Do It, Bees Do It: A Century of Sex (Mis)Education in the United States

Editor’s Note: A marvelous online exhibit from the University of California, Berkeley and its libraries. Permanently online

From junior high school hygiene films to websites, public health campaigns, scientific studies, children’s books, bodice-ripper novels and (sometimes) parents, Americans have always found ways to learn about sex. That information has at times been incorrect or incomplete, and has rarely been delivered without a larger political or moral agenda. While attitudes towards sex education swing from the blissfulness of ignorance to the empowerment of liberation — and back again — every generation finds new ways to answer the old questions. Our desire to learn about desire has not changed. This exhibition draws from the resources of campus libraries, from our academic programs, and from social services provided for the Berkeley campus community.

This exhibition explores the many ways Americans have employed over the last century to teach and learn about sex. It draws from the resources of campus libraries, from our academic programs and from social services provided for the Berkeley campus community.

Early Twentieth Century

The use of ambiguous language, euphemisms and symbolism to describe sex and its related issues characterizes the public discourse on sex in the early 20th century.

World War II Period & the 1950s

In the popular imagination, post-war America was a period of wholesomeness and restraint. But it was during this period that Alfred Kinsey, published the Kinsey Reports, and Masters and Johnson began their research on the nature of sexual response.

Learning from Lesbian and Gay Pulps

Pulps were cheaply produced novels made to be sold at news stands, bus stations and drugstores — places where readers could make quick, anonymous purchases without being exposed by their choice of reading matter.

Academic and Scholarly Works at UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley scholars have been researching sex, sexuality, and sex education for decades — possibly a hundred years.

FemSex

One of two early student-facilitated classes on sexuality taught through the DeCal program, Female Sexuality offered a safe space for students to learn about power and privilege as it relates to their sexual health and experiences.

Campus sexual health at UC Berkeley

Peer-based sexual health and education have been an integral — if not sometimes controversial — aspect of campus student health since 1970.

Heather, Hope and more

One of the first children’s books to feature a same-sex couple, Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) was self-published by author Lesléa Newman who reflects that “it is important for children to see their own images reflected back to themselves…”

The Sexual Revolution

The confluence of several phenomena in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s facilitated the development of the so-called ‘Sexual Revolution.’

The Seventies: children, teens and parents

During the 1970s, as with the media and pop culture general, increasing sexual candor found its way into literature for children and young adults.

January 8, 2015
Teacups and Friendship, Witnessing Friendship and Life Across the Table From My Elders

English Land Girls Eileen Barry, Audrey Willis, Betty Long and Audrey Prickett enjoy a hot cup of tea in 1942 on a Sussex, England farm during 1942. Ministry of Information Photo, Imperial War Museum

by Roberta McReynolds

The gift bag that Tracy handed to me produced a moist sheen in my eyes and warmth to my heart. She had no idea that her simple token was triggering a flood of memories that were transporting me back before I was even old enough to attend school.

I was gazing down at a pair of hefty coffee mugs the color of onyx, and nestled between them was a 5″ aluminum pail filled with an assortment of tea bags. The glaze finish on the outside of each mug was matte in texture while the handle, rim and inside were gloss. Using the surface like a slate chalkboard, Tracy had written a greeting on the outside of each mug in colored chalk. How clever! Yet even the act of holding that stick of powdery chalk in my fingers provided a reinforcing link to my childhood.

It was practically a rite of passage for little girls of my generation to own a miniature version of their mother’s tea service. I received several sets, in fact, from the assortment of female relatives who were eager to instill lessons in social etiquette. All this focus was being directed toward a girl-child who was showing early signs of what they probably considered an abnormal interest in activities her father enjoyed, rather than domestic skills.

A hodgepodge of mismatched pieces from my old toy sets still survive, which ironically is not terribly unlike the mugs, teacups and saucers in my kitchen today.

Much to the delight and hopefulness of the aforementioned well-intentioned women in my family, I must have staged countless tea parties because those toys bear the patina of frequent play. The customary guests at my child-sized table were a handmade brown corduroy rabbit with button eyes and a floppy-eared yellow fleece dog whose nose would squeak when it was squeezed. The occupant of the fourth chair was subject to my whims of the day; perhaps a Teddy bear would be granted the honor of attending, or even my tabby cat (provided that he was feeling particularly patient, since he was often required to wear a baby bonnet).

My first recollections of being included in the grown-up ritual of women gathering to visit over a cup of hot tea date back to when I was at least four years old. I was always on my best behavior, because I intuited this was a special privilege. I can still picture my great-grandmother’s sunny kitchen with her canary singing along with the whistling teakettle. After the tea had steeped in the pot for a few minutes, she would elegantly pour a small amount into my cup. My serving amounted to approximately one-part tea and four-parts warmed milk. I never complained about that, because I was so grateful to receive any share of the obviously prized liquid. My mother even allowed me to add one cube of sugar so I could carefully imitate the gentle stirring as the sweet granules dissolved. I practiced drinking with my little finger aimed at the ceiling and concentrated on attempting to place my cup on the saucer as daintily as possible after each sip.

January 7, 2015
Clothes Encounters: Where were the modest plaid skirts, bow-tied blouses, and shiny loafers my girl friends and I wore to high school?

By Rose Madeline Mula

Recently, I was walking by the local high school at the closing bell. As I watched swarms of kids spilling out the doors, I wondered if someone had laced my lunch yogurt with LSD. Or maybe I had somehow wandered onto the set of a movie whose costume designer had gone berserk.

Cropped screenshot of actress Audrey Hepburn from the trailer for the 1953 film Roman Holiday; Wikimedia Commons

Something was definitely wrong with this picture. Earrings, nose rings, eyebrow rings, bizarre hair-dos, purple nail polish … on the boys. Even weirder, one of them was actually wearing a bathrobe and slippers. I swear. The others sported second-skin-tight bicycle shorts or kaleidoscopic, ridiculously baggy pants obviously stolen from Barnum & Bailey. Topping these were huge sweat shirts emblazoned with obscene slogans and very graphic graphics.

As for the girls, most of them looked like they had just sashayed off the runway of the old burlesque house. I could not believe they had been allowed into school in those snug, crotch-high skirts, necklines that dipped to their navels, and combat boots. Where were the modest plaid skirts, bow-tied blouses, and shiny loafers my girl friends and I wore to high school? Probably in the Smithsonian along with the boys’ neatly pressed corduroy trousers, white shirts and argyle socks.

When I got home I pulled out the old family albums to see if maybe my memory had finally deserted me completely. Could our clothes really have been so different from those of today’s kids? Ah, yes. There we were, all gussied up, in those black and white photos with the curlicue edges. Those were the post-depression years, so none of us were well-heeled; but we certainly were well-dressed. And well-coiffed. The grammar school me smiled shyly at the camera, my long banana curls clipped in place with a huge taffeta bow. I was wearing my favorite puffed sleeved, Shirley Temple frock, ankle socks, and gleaming patent leather Mary Janes. My girl friends looked equally ladylike. And the boys — all natty and neat in their knickers, knee socks and newly shorn heads. No ponytails, dreadlocks or Mohawks. Fortunately. If a boy had walked into class with any of the above, Teacher would have flat-lined before she had a chance to send him to the principal’s office.

January 6, 2015
State Lawmakers Tackle Public Health Issues: Preventing drug overdose deaths, restricting e-cigarettes and making medical marijuana more available

The Brattleboro Retreat, founded in 1834, is a facility for the treatment of mental health disorders and drug addiction. It is located in Bratteboro, Vermont on a site of over 1000 acres on the Retreat Meadows inlet of the West River, Wikimedia Commons

By Christine Vestal, Stateline

Four years into implementing the Affordable Care Act, state politicians turned their attention to other pressing health care issues such as preventing drug overdose deaths, restricting e-cigarettes and making medical marijuana more available.

States also grappled with the question of who should receive a costly and highly effective cure for hepatitis C. A few states also launched programs aimed at controlling two of the costliest chronic conditions — asthma and diabetes.

And throughout the first half of the year, states still debated the highest-profile questions about the ACA: whether to expand Medicaid and how to improve their insurance exchanges.

Here’s a look at the top public health issues addressed in state legislatures this year:

Click to view.

Medical Marijuana

Responding in part to new laws in Colorado and Washington state that allow recreational use of marijuana, as well as growing public support for its decriminalization, lawmakers in at least 15 states considered broad medical marijuana measures this year. In addition, 16 state legislatures considered narrower bills, allowing the use of cannabidiol, one of the compounds in marijuana.

California voters ushered in the nation’s first comprehensive medical marijuana law back in 1996, followed by Alaska, Oregon and Washington in 1998, Maine in 1999, and Colorado, Hawaii and Nevada in 2000.

Over the next 13 years, a dozen more states and the District of Columbia enacted measures allowing the use of marijuana to treat conditions such as glaucoma and multiple sclerosis, and the nausea, pain and loss of appetite associated with diseases such as cancer and AIDS.

This year, Maryland and Minnesota enacted new laws, New York’s legislature is considering one and Florida voters will decide in November whether to approve medical marijuana.

If Florida and New York adopt medical marijuana laws, more than half of all Americans will live in states where the substance can be used to treat a wide variety of conditions and symptoms.

A new type of medical marijuana law emerged this year that limits use to one compound found in the plant, cannabidiol or cannabis oil, and restricts its use to epilepsy and a few other conditions. At least 16 GOP-led states have considered bills that would allow cannabidiol use.

So far, Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin have enacted limited medical marijuana laws, and legislatures in Florida, Iowa and Missouri have approved bills that await their governors’ signatures.

Inspired by an August 2013 CNN program featuring a child whose parents claimed her severe seizures were all but eliminated by cannabidiol, these limited laws are not likely to increase access to the plant’s curative benefits because of restrictions on how they are dispensed, said Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates for decriminalization. But she said they may be the first step toward more effective laws.

Drug Overdoses

Vermont’s Democratic governor Peter Shumlin devoted his entire state-of-the state address in January to a single topic: the rising tide of heroin and prescription drug abuse “in every corner” of Vermont.

January 5, 2015
One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature at the Grolier Club: Stories and illustrations entwined with enticing worlds

At The Grolier Club through February 7, 2015

Powerful narrative, unforgettable characters, illustration that stirs the imagination, and insights that engage the mind and heart — literature for children is forged from the same enduring elements as literature for adults. Children’s books with these qualities often shine for generations, with some achieving landmark fame. A few such books ultimately go on to enter the canon of classics of children’s literature.

The Grolier Club’s milestone public exhibition, One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature, showcases one hundred books of this caliber, printed from 1600 to 2000. On view through February 7, 2015, the show includes such beloved books as Robinson Crusoe, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh, Charlotte’s Web, The Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are, and Harry Potter. These classics and others — many famous today, some only in their time — will bring smiles of enjoyment to adults and children alike.

The curator and children’s book authority Chris Loker has secured loans from major institutions throughout North America for this exhibition. Among them are the American Antiquarian Society; Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University; Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University; Houghton Library, Harvard University; The Morgan Library & Museum; as well as numerous distinguished private collections.

The books are displayed according to key themes in children’s literature: Fairy Tales & Fables, Faith, Learning, Nursery Rhymes, Poetry, Girls & Boys, Animals, Fantasy, Adventure, Novelties, and Toys. This organization allows viewers to see genres of literature for children ranging from early forms of instructional and devotional primers to exuberant expressions of rhymes, tales, stories, novels, and picture books. First or early editions are displayed wherever possible, some of them extremely rare.

The oldest book in the exhibition, Orbis Pictus, published in Nuremberg in 1658, is a bilingual schoolbook in simple encyclopedic form for young students of Latin (the text is in both Latin and German.) Used for two centuries throughout Europe, it is an early effort at integrated text and pictures, and thus shows a pivotal step in the development of the illustrated book for children.The New-England Primer is one of only two extant copies printed in 1727 (the earliest known surviving edition.) In print for over 200 years, this was the first reader for many young Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries, and thus one of the most frequently read books in the United States.

Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (Vol. 2), published in London in 1744, is an exceptionally important book, although not well known today. It is the first known collection of English nursery rhymes, gathering together the earliest recorded versions of ditties crooned to babies such as “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” “Hickory, Dickory, Dock” (here titled “The Mouse ran up ye clock”), “Mary Mary Quite Contrary,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and “Cock Robin,” among others.

Songs of Innocence, Written, illustrated and published by William Blake in London, 1789

Songs of Innocence, written, illustrated and published by William Blake in London in 1789, contains his short lyric poems for children. It is the third in Blake’s series of illuminated books — the earliest examples of artist’s books. Created by this 18th century British visionary, poet, author, painter, illustrator, printer and engraver, this copy is one of fewer than forty manuscript copies made, has never been out of print, and is an artistic masterpiece.

January 2, 2015